Senior Lecturer in Political Theory

Profile

Joe is a lecturer in Political Theory in the School of Politics and International Politics at Queen Mary University of London. He has worked previously at City University London, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he also received his PhD.

Joe’s research draws, productively and at times uncomfortably, from both agonistic political theory and a critical reading of American Pragmatism, with a focus on the work of John Dewey. For the past several years he has focused on the use of human rights by diverse political movements, in order to take the measure of both their limitations and their promise for a more radically democratic world. His latest research project rethinks questions of global justice by focusing on the injustices experienced in contemporary urban life to develop an argument in favour of more inclusive and democratic cities.

Undergraduate Teaching

Research

Research Interests:

My research is centrally concerned with questions of global ethics. Over the past several years, I have focused on the contested idea of universal human rights, including how this idea developed, how it transformed world politics, and what further changes it may yet enable – specially looking at the human right to housing.

My current research examines questions of justice by looking at global cities as key sites of injustice, which reframes questions about global justice in profound ways. The key claim in this project is that global justice requires an engagement with the globalisation of the process of urbanisation and suggests that justice demands a political project of making cities more democratic and egalitarian.

Philosophically, my work draws from pragmatist and pluralist traditions, especially developing a situationist ethics inspired by John Dewey, which sits alongside an agonistic and pluralist commitment to radical democracy. At the centre of my research is a concern to interrogate the philosophical ideas through which we understand the world, and which guide our actions. In turn, I also try to attend to how philosophical reflection grounded in everyday political experience can assist in addressing pressing social problems, leading to my interest in developing ways of doing “global ethics” in a manner that is engaged with practical political action.

Current Research Project:

Justice in the Global City

In this project I look, first, at how our understanding of justice is impaired by thinking in terms of the global or the nation as privileged political spaces. Second, I argue that we can better understand what global justice requires by attending to the injustices we find in contemporary global cities. Third, I argue that justice consists in substantive inclusion for all people in the political spaces and processes that affect them, and this requires inclusion in substantively democratic institutions that control the spaces we inhabit and the processes that affect us. From this conclusion, I then argue that we can see a model for this account of justice taking shape in contemporary global cities, where movements for urban justice emphasise three key requirements of justice: first, that the denizen (the person who dwells in the city) has political standing (rather than only the citizen or property owner); second, cities are a common resource and collective home to everyone who lives in them, which requires rethinking how access to economic wealth and political power are distributed—requiring a far more democratic distribution of both; and, third, as global cities are both affected by global processes and exert global effects, we can see that democratising the economic and political life of cities also entails changes in how cities relate—to nations, to other cities, to individuals.

Examples of research funding:

Centre for Global Cooperation Research - Research Fellowship (2017)

This is a nine-month fellowship at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen where I will be working on my research project Justice in the Global City

City University London - Enterprise Seed Fund (2016)

This fund supported a collaborative learning workshop on the London housing crisis, which brought academics, activists and affected communities together to learn, share and think about how academics can contribute to efforts to address the dire housing situation in London. This workshop is part of an effort to expand my research on the human right to housing from the US to the UK, and to continue thinking about how we can conduct collaborative normative research.

City University London - Pump Priming Competitive Grant (2014)

This grant supported fieldwork in the USA, principally in Washington DC and Chicago, looking at the movement for a human right to housing.